About Last Night. . .

Michael Moynihan
From the free press, this is honestly, I'm Michael Moynihan. There are 40% fewer people coming across the border legally. It's better than when he left office. And I'm going to continue to move until we get the total ban on the total initiative relative to what we can do with more Border Patrol and more asylum officers. President Trump, I really don't know what he said at the end of that sentence.

Joe Biden
I don't think he knows what he said either. We had the safest border in the history of our country. It's midnight here in the east coast, and I don't know how you're feeling, but tonight was objectively a disaster for President Joe Biden. Solitary person eligible for what I've been able to do with the COVID excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with what if we finally beat Medicare? Thank you, president.

Michael Moynihan
There was no raucous audience cheering and jeering, but the first presidential debate between Biden and former President Donald Trump was a painful affair. The idea that she was murdered by an immigrant coming in, they talk about that. But here's the deal. There's a lot of young women are being raped by their, by their in laws, by their spouses, brothers and sisters, by just ridiculous, and they can do. Nothing about it and they try to rescue it.

And it wasn't just Republicans and maggot offenders who found it painful. Even the most steadfast Biden partisans were devastated. This was a game changing debate in the sense that right now, as we speak, there is a deep, a wide and a very aggressive panic in the Democratic Party. It started minutes into the, panicked into. Some kind of argument.

Ben Smith
Whereas Biden's answers were, in a lot of cases not coherent, deeply problematic that. He, Democrats, as this debate progressed, and you are starting to see here, at least privately, discussions among Democrats about whether or not Biden can effectively go on with this campaign against Donald Trump. Donald Trump, dazed. That was painful. I love Joe Biden.

Michael Moynihan
I work for Joe Biden. He didn't do well at all. He did not do well at all. And I think you're going to hear discussions that I don't know will lead to anything, but there are going to be discussions about whether he should continue. That first initial impression, Nicole, of President Biden walking out and his voice being very hard to here.

Ben Smith
It's hard to tell what he was saying because his voice was so weak. And his halting delivery in his first couple of answers has got to have put a shock into the campaign, at least at the start. Before he started, he wasn't capable of doing any better than he did. He had all prepared to not go. Over the two minutes he was incapable.

Unidentified Speaker
Tonight on the biggest of stages that he sought, he, in effect, dictated. And with all of that preparation, he was incapable of doing better than he was. And you can't come back from that. You can't be in a state where tens of millions of Americans watched you and come up empty. And that's what he did tonight.

I think I should start by saying without any apologies, that I love Joe Biden and Jill and I will gladly debate anybody, anytime, anyplace, anywhere over the issue of whether Joe Biden has been the most effective president. His presidency has been an unqualified success. If, however, you believe, as do I, and fear just how dark of a place a second Donald Trump term will take America, then I think its critical that we ask the same questions about this man. I love respect. If he were CEO and he turned into performance like that, would any corporation in America, any Fortune 500 corporation in America, keep him on his CEO?

Michael Moynihan
These are some of the same people who for months told us not to be concerned about the president's age. Start your tape right now because I'm about to tell you the truth. An f you, if you can't handle the truth. This version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever. Not a close second.

Unidentified Speaker
And I've known him for years. The Brzezinskis have known him for 50 years. Tonight, America saw with our very own eyes how very wrong they were. Joining me to break down what we just saw and what it might mean for the polls is Mary Kathryn Hamm and Ben Smith. Mary Catherine is a Fox News analyst and the co host of the podcast getting hammered and relevant detail.

Michael Moynihan
In 2016, Mary Catherine was a co moderator of a republican presidential debate. Ben Smith is the co founder and editor in chief of Semaphore, a former media columnist for the New York Times, and the co host of a new podcast called Mixed Signals. Ben, Mary Catherine, welcome to honestly, thank you very much. Yeah, thanks for having us on. What did we just witness?

It's the only way I can think of phrases. I feel like Mary Catherine's laugh sort of captured the entire situation right there. I mean, I think we witnessed a real disaster for Joe Biden, the beginning of at least kind of a mini crisis for the democratic party. Yeah, look, I'm a double hater suburban mom. I'm not exactly a normie, but I consider myself Normie adjacent.

Ben Smith
Some of my best friends are normal. I spend my nights talking about politics. They don't. But I think thinking about what might affect this demo. Before the debate, I said, okay, well, Trump's gotta fight his biggest problems, which is his lack of discipline, and he's gotta be Trump, but less Trump.

And Biden needs to show people that he's in control and be sort of steady and in command. And I think one of those things happened. Trump was less Trump. He skated on the edge at times of being more Trump or enough Trump, but then he kept kind of veering back into less Trump. He was Trump weird, but it was sort of funny Trump weird.

It wasn't always super cutting. It wasn't scary most of the time. And Biden just right out of the gate. There's no way to escape the voice and the demeanor and the fact that he just was not communicating, that he's got this under control. One of the most interesting things was watching this debate with about 50 people, only a few of whom were journalists.

Michael Moynihan
And the gasps in the room when Joe Biden first froze about 1112 minutes into the debate, the question that most of the people around me were asking were, how do the Democrats allow this to happen? The people who are close to Joe Biden know Joe Biden. They might be saying, well, these are cheap fakes. And this is, you know, republican misinformation. They see this daily.

Ben, why do you think they did this? I mean, I think they were gambling. I mean, you know, how politicians in sort of american politics, you know, any given politician is in some sense like the tip of a giant iceberg of people who work for them, a whole industry. And, you know, and when that, and when Dianne Feinstein dies, like, there go hundreds of jobs. And Biden, as the president of the United States, is the sort of, you know, everyone around him is deeply, personally invested in and in many ways, I'm sure, also true believers, but also have a personal stake in his continued success.

Mary Kathryn Hamm
And I'm sure he has better moments and worse moments. We saw that tonight, too, right? There were like three or four minute stretches when he seemed fine. And I think they gambled. I think they thought maybe.

I think he gambled that maybe this will be a good night. Mary Catherine, a theory batting around with some friends that this was like the producers. There were people from the democratic party who allowed this to happen, because what you are seeing on CNN, on MSNBC, less on MSNBC, but is full blown panic and people saying on Twitter and within the cognaccenti of the democratic party. We must replace him. I mean, the same question that I asked Ben, how does this happen?

Michael Moynihan
And am I being a little too conspiratorial about this? So I don't think I buy the conspiracy theory because I think I watch the team around Biden often gamble. Right. Like, there seems to be an advanced bubble situation there where not a lot of info is coming in that is cutting against what they think. There is a uniform belief that Trump is out of bounds.

Ben Smith
Who would consider him? They've all been very dedicated to that idea for a very long time. But the fact is that voters aren't as dedicated to that as they are. And I think their dedication to that idea has made them miss and has been note some of their personal investment and their true believing has made them miss that this is the true state of things. Now, I do think that the people closest to him who were at that debate prep when they put him out on stage tonight, do I think they believed he was gonna pull this off?

Well, no, but I think they hoped he'd put 30 good minutes together and that people would say that Trump guy's still weird and crazy. We don't want him. I think that was probably the idea. Ben, how did Donald Trump perform? I mean, most of the post debate commentary, and this is a great benefit for Donald Trump, is about Joe Biden's performance.

Michael Moynihan
But if you isolate Donald Trump's performance, how do you think he did? You know, I mean, I think in some sense, that's a meaningless question because the one story out of the debate is Biden. But I, you know, Trump obviously came in with feeling like he was trying just to stay cool, like, you know, television. There's this idea of sort of television as a medium that favors coolness and sort of, and I think he was trying to keep the temperature down. And I think he really did that for a while.

Mary Kathryn Hamm
Then there was a moment that somebody described as like a sort of fight at a bingo hall early on where, like, they both kind of lost it. And hot Trump, I think, freaks people out and reminds people of what they didn't like about him. And there were flashes throughout of that. I mean, of Trump just getting hot, of going off on weird tangents. I think when he was defending himself on Roe v.

Wade and talking about. Killing babies, some states Democrat run, take it after birth again, the governor, former governor of Virginia, put the baby down. Then we decide what to do with it. So he's willing to, as we say, rip the baby out of the womb in the 9th month and kill the baby. Nobody wants that to happen, Democrat or Republican.

You know, like he just, he just didn't, wasn't where he wanted to be, but he, but he didn't veer as far in that direction as Biden veered in the direction of just not being strong and totally with it. Mary Kathryn, I thought, you know, that Trump's debate prep as such, as one can Prep Donald Trump for a debate, it must have been something like, you know, the reason you agreed to this is to watch Joe Biden hopefully self immolate on stage when he starts doing it. And I thought was an amazing thing for the first 2030 minutes. There's a few moments, as Ben says, where he actually took a few digs, but he said nothing about these long pauses, about these brain freezes, about sentences that didn't make a ton of sense. A few times he did, but he kind of was pulled back quite a bit.

Michael Moynihan
That was a level of discipline I didn't expect. I had an inkling that perhaps he was listening in briefings the other day when he did that attack line at a rally on Medicare advantage. And I thought, that's a fact he just learned. Right. And he's been listening to these guys who are trying to prep him, but that doesn't mean you can prep his discipline.

Ben Smith
Right. And so I think you're correct about that. I believe it was 22 minutes in when he said what I think is probably the line of the night, which is, I don't know what you said at the end of that sentence, and I don't think you do either. Yeah. So that, and look, that was the right thing to do in that moment.

That was the first time he addressed it. Everyone was thinking it. And that's the kind of line and the kind of moment that lands. But there were several moments, and I disagree with Ben a bit about the abortion exchange, and it may be largely because Biden failed to land a punch. But I thought Trump came out pretty decent in that exchange.

He sounded moderate at times. I think he is more moderate than Biden in a lot of ways on this issue, because Biden's refusing in that moment to say, to answer Dana Bash's very tough question, which is, do you actually believe in any limits in these states where there are none? I don't think he came out too bad there. But again, this is because Biden repeatedly, even on the easy stuff, couldn't land. A punch and couldn't really nail the details.

Mary Kathryn Hamm
Like when he was talking about, I think he was trying to talk about the first trimesters between a woman and God, the second between a woman and her doctor, the third between a woman and the state or something. But he just was getting words wrong and numbers wrong, and it just kept, whenever he tried to speak in detail about economics, numbers just kind of wandering off. There's a list of people by whom you could be raped, which I found, like, that's, like, you don't want to be in that. I watch it with my family. And that line about in law being raped by your in laws.

Like, what? They talk about that. But here's the deal. There's a lot of young women are being raped by their, by their in laws, by their, by their spouses, brothers and sisters, by. It's just ridiculous.

I think everybody that was the one that my daughter is still kind of like what just happened there. And I think that in that exchange about abortion, Joe Biden mysteriously invoked a undocumented immigrant who committed some sort of crime that was like, first of all, this is going to Boomerang on you. And second of all, it doesn't seem to have any relationship to the question at hand. Look, there's so many young women who have been, including a young woman who just was murdered. And he went to the funeral.

Donald Trump
The idea that she was murdered by an immigrant coming in, they talk about. Yeah, I also had no idea what the hell he was talking about. He also, I believe, was the first to bring up Afghanistan, which I thought was an unforced error. You don't have to bring that up right at the very beginning of the debate, and he left that opening, the. Idea that he did something that was significant.

And the military, you know, when he was president, they were still killing people in Afghanistan. He didn't do anything about that when he was president. We were. I'll tell you what happened. He was so bad with Afghanistan.

Joe Biden
It was such a horrible embarrassment, most embarrassing moment in the history of our country that when Putin watched that and he saw the incompetence that he should, he should have fired those generals like I fired the one. Trump didn't hit all the openings. There were plenty that he didn't hit, but there were plenty he did. Yeah. And I think you can just see the people, the Joe Biden's aide, saying, like, all right now just sort of with the words in their mouths that he should be saying that.

Mary Kathryn Hamm
He was just not quite able to. Say, Ben, you're an astute observer of the media. You've written about the media for many years for the New York Times, especially when you look at how the media handled Joe Biden's obvious cognitive slowdown, shall we say, euphemistically. And you watch sort of Morning Joe. And here's a quote from Morning Joe, the guy.

Michael Moynihan
See both these guys right there? I've spent time with both these guys privately. I've spent time with Biden and Trump privately. I spent time with every House speaker over the past 30 years. And Joe Biden, it's not even close.

And he's saying that he's sharper than any of these people. And then you think of things like special counsel Robert Hur, who said that he couldn't remember that he was Barack Obama's vice president. He didn't remember what year Beau died. And then recently, a story in the Wall Street Journal, a reported story, not an opinion story about some of the concerns about Joe Biden's slowdown, which was ruthlessly attacked. That story from many, many people for heavily relying on republican sources.

It seems a bit like a vindication tonight. I think everybody who was saying this stuff, particularly her, I bet, is feeling vindicated, but it's tricky to report. It's a very closed world that Biden's in that journal story, which I'm sure Emma Tucker, the other journal, is feeling very vindicated right now. But also the story that you would have wanted was on the record, anecdotes from neutral observers, and they didn't get them. It's hard to penetrate.

Mary Kathryn Hamm
That's not their fault. I do think the other side of that, though, was that there's an impulse in media to say, well, Trump is also old. And there has been a kind of fantasy on the left, really since I think, like 2015, that Trump suffers from dementia. Maybe this is my dementia, but I think there was like a book or something in the first term analyzing his speech patterns and saying that he had some mental illness and was quickly falling apart. And lately, the democratic spin has been look like the Republicans clip little bits of biden seeming old.

We're going to clip little bits of Trump seeming incoherent. And that actually, I think, allowed Trump just by being basically normal in his cognitive functioning, to surprise a lot of people who had been drinking that Kool Aid, which was real, just nonsense, just classic politics, just hacky politics. You attack me for this, I'm gonna use you. The same thing kind of regardless. And it did fall apart, I thought, on that stage.

Ben Smith
The thing about both of them is there's sort of inherently low expectations for both of them coming into this. And you allude to that because the thing about Trump, and this is the reason for the double haters, is that he's, like, sort of energetically and consistently wackadoodle. It's a different kind of vibe. Yeah. He's an extraordinary television talent, one of the great.

Mary Kathryn Hamm
You find him wackadoodle, but he was a beloved entertainer for decades. And, like, he's great on tv, and he was showing why he's great on tv. And most of us have our minds totally made up about him, obviously, and are either love him or repelled. But I think he wasn't just coherent. He's very, very good at talking to a camera, and the camera is just unbelievably unkind to Biden.

I thought there were elements of just the way he looked. The stills. Yeah, rough. Mary. Kevin, what do you think about that?

Michael Moynihan
There is a point at which, and I think this is pretty common in debates, the second half of the debate, people tend to tune out and drop off. They've made up their minds. And this was certainly true of the crowd that I was with. It was very hard to hear the debate because most people were just talking at this point. But when you heard and you were amongst this din of people just talking about how insane of a car crash was going on in the screen, you looked up at the screen and Joe Biden was looking off into the distance, not looking straight at the camera, knowing that the camera's trained on him.

And that split screen, he seemed kind of distant even before he opened his mouth. Well, and we live in a meme ified world, for better or for worse. So a lot of those stills will be captioned. A lot of those stills will be passed around. Now, Trump, right, Trump makes his own share of weird faces, but he did look in command.

Ben Smith
He looked like he was paying attention. Part of being on tv is learning to tame your face. Frankly, I've never been that good at it, and I do a lot of nonverbal communication reaction shots. But you want to be reacting like Trump almost, even if it's a little to your detriment versus just being slack jawed, which is a bit what Biden was giving. And I think that will be passed around via very short clips after this debate and have some lasting impact.

Michael Moynihan
Ben, what happens now? I mean, if you look at these people giving the post mortems, it's not necessarily 25th amendment postmortem. That's sort of a rough, rough metaphor here. An appropriate. Nobody died on that stage.

Mary Kathryn Hamm
They did, actually. The career of Joe Biden died on that stage, I think. But you have people invoking, what do we do about him now? I mean, that is not what I expected at the end of the night. And that's on amongst liberal journalists and amongst people who are sort of democratic party grandees.

If only liberal journalists were in America, Michael, basically, now there's going to be a cycle inside the Democratic Democratic Party, such as it is. The institutional party barely exists these days. And the question will be, will very, very prominent figures publicly call on Biden to step down? That means Barack Obama number one. That means Barack Obama number one.

Bill Clinton number two. Hillary Clinton number three, Chuck Schumer, maybe number four, Hakeem Jeffries number. Go down that list. I think I would have said yesterday there was a 0% chance, and I think there is a chance of that now. I would put it relatively low still, and maybe I'm crazy, but I think his opponent was convicted of a crime a couple of weeks ago and that kind of drifted away.

And maybe the next step, actually, is that we'll look at the polls and we'll see they moved one point and everybody will calm down, or maybe we'll look at the polls and they moved five points, in which case you're going to see a real cycle of panic. And there was that Ezra Klein column a couple of months ago outlining how an open convention would work as a kind of like incredibly media, incredible media spectacle and kind of a Hail Mary, but sure is late to be having this conversation. I think there's a couple issues. One, that the next person in line is Kamala, who doesn't make a lot of people happy, even the constituencies that she was hired to make excited or not excited. And then I think it's a come for the king.

Ben Smith
You best not miss moment, because if you don't line up all those very heavy hitters at the same time and you get sort of a smattering of lower level voices, he can, Governor Northam, this thing, which is when the Virginia governor was asked by several prominent people to step aside and he was like, nah, nah. I mean, Joe Biden is the president, and he's been running to be the president since I was eight years old. Like, it's gonna be hard to get him to let go. And the delegates to the convention are assigned to him. And so it's not like a right.

Mary Kathryn Hamm
There's no, no one else can pull that lever other than him. But at the same time, I mean, the Democrats want to win. I mean, winning is the point, right? And it doesn't look like this is a person prepared to win an election. But I would just say, like we are talking in the immediate aftermath of a shocking event that we are confident will change the course of this election.

And there have been a number of those that have not changed the course of this election. So maybe we should all sleep on it and wake up in the morning. It'll turn out that know we're just still living in this particular situation we've been in for a while. Mary Kathy, do you think the same thing? I mean, I, watching this, had the idea that this is one of the biggest car crashes I've ever seen in american politics, and I think this one's going to have a longer tail.

Michael Moynihan
Am I wrong about that? Look, if there's anything that could change the nature of the election, that performance would be it. However, if there was anything that could change the nature of the election a month ago, it would have been one of the candidates being convicted of a felony. Right. And that didn't change the situation.

Ben Smith
So I'm not sure. By the way, this is a little in the weeds, but does it matter to their process? Look, I agree with Ben. We're very late in the game for them switching. And my take has always been that he's going to end up being the candidate in the end.

Does it matter that they did this virtual DNC gathering and voted on him to get him on the ballot in Ohio to fix their sort of screw up where they did not do that process soon enough or properly? I wonder if that puts a little wrinkle in the plan to do an open convention or does that matter at all? I mean, I think, you know, I think if he decides, if the president decides to open up the convention, they can change the rules. I mean, it is a, it's a, you know, they can change. They can, they'll have to make up some rules for that situation.

Mary Kathryn Hamm
And that would be an incredible story, wouldn't it? Let's talk. I would say let's talk about policy. We've had a conversation for 20 minutes now. We haven't talked about policy.

Michael Moynihan
Is there, I mean, was there a substantive argument made on either side that struck you as well that was well put and fairly convincing to any of these small number of uncommitted voters? I was just grading on not scaring the crap out of them. And on that front, like, I think Trump did better than Biden, I wasn't really grading on the idea that they would actually appeal to anyone. Although Trump showed a bit more empathy than I would have imagined at moments, I thought his answer? Well, I thought particularly his answer, this is not an empathy moment, but it's a not all about him moment, which is rare with him.

Ben Smith
When he said, I wish you were a great president, and then I wouldn't have to be here. And I thought that wasn't a bad line because, like I said, he's so self involved all the time that that was one moment where it felt like he wasn't. Well, the second half was how rich he is and how he could be at one of his eleven houses. I mean, it was just a setup for that. I wish he was a great president because I wouldn't be here right now.

Joe Biden
I'd be at one of my many places enjoying myself. I wouldn't be under indictment. It was a setup for that. But it's also, he was the one who said, you know, you didn't run because of Charlottesville. And it's like, well, you also would still be here if Joe Biden was.

Ben Smith
Quote unquote, I was kind of checking for when Joe Biden's empathy would kick in. And I think it was late into the debate. It was like 1020 or something. And it was. I can't remember.

Oh, it was the second time that he talked about black voters, by the way. The nation was on the edge of its seat watching two old white guys talk about black voters for like seven minutes. I was like, ooh, let's speak. Very strange category of black jobs. I didn't know there was such a thing.

So in this, his second chance at that question, when Dan Bash prompted him to answer it again, he did show some empathy. Do you say, to black voters who are disappointed with the progress so far? I say, I don't blame them for being disappointed. Inflation is still hurting them badly. For example, I provided for the.

Mary Kathryn Hamm
Yeah, I mean, I did not hear a lot of policy. I mean, the right is, as Mary Hannah said, there was like an actual spirited debate about abortion and Trump sort of attempting to back off repealing Roe. And I think, I mean, the only story we published on policy was, it sounded like Trump was saying more clearly than he has ever said that he is okay with abortion pills and he's not going to try to use the federal government to shut down. I mean, that is a huge policy issue that affects lots of people. I mean, the problem with Trump policy statements is they have no meaning.

And he might say the opposite tomorrow. But I think that was probably the biggest policy news. I mean, I thought his defense of tariffs is sort of interesting, right? They did not blow up the economy last time, as many predicted. Okay.

But I don't think this is one that's going to be studied at the Kennedy school for its rigor. And I was thinking, not everybody I was with was a us citizen and someone there was just saying, imagine Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer and what that debate looks like versus what this debate looks like. Just different category of thing. MK, an embarrassment for the United States. This debate, this entire election process, to.

Ben Smith
Be honest, it's pretty bad. Oh, yeah, pretty bad. I wish we weren't here. I've argued that we could make different choices energetically. I've argued more energetically than Joe Biden on the stage tonight.

And yet here we are. Yeah, it doesn't look good. You know, I was thinking during this debate, and this is probably a, a bigger question than this debate. It's a very big question. But, Mary, Kathy, you've been an observer of this for a long time, particularly from the right and the evolution or devolution of the Republican Party.

Michael Moynihan
Do we spring back from this? I mean, is there a politics that looks anything like Mitt Romney and Barack Obama? Or. I was watching the debate between George HW Bush and Michael Dukakis, and it's like this is a different universe. Nothing even similar at all.

You would think that they were playing different sports. Do we get back to this point ever? I think a person, a figure, a leader can change a lot in a party, as Trump has done, but in a different direction. I think the Republican Party had a chance at one or two of those during this primary season and took a pass. But here's the other side of that, which is I read somewhere today that this is the first time since 2004 that the republican candidate has had a trending lead for a large part of the election year.

Ben Smith
Like, that's the proof's sort of in the pudding, and that's what republican voters react to, to some degree. 2020, obviously, a giant asterisk in his success electorally. But it does matter to people that this is how he's performing. And so I don't think we go back to the same model of republican candidate as a Mitt Romney as much as someone like me would maybe prefer that. It has to be some combo of a little bit more fight, I think, and a little bit more populism, because that's just where voters are.

And in order to listen to them, and then when you got to do. That, I mean, ideologically, it's a very weird place when you hear a quote about Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, would you, Donald Trump, potentially, possibly try to bring Haley's voters in by picking her as vice president? Someone responded to this by saying, you know, she is a puppet of the billionaires and the warmongers. It was Bernie Sanders, it was Donald Trump junior. That sounds like somebody on the radical left 10, 15, 20 years ago.

Michael Moynihan
That is a Republican saying that now the son of the president. And that is the kind of language of the Republican Party now. It's very, very distant from the Republican Party that I remember. 1015, you know, and of course, what they do is the invocation of Reagan as Trump did many, many times tonight. Ben, what do you think?

Mary Kathryn Hamm
I mean, I don't think it was a great night for America, but I mean, I think if you look at the sort of evolution of these right wing populists, like, on one hand, proving that you're an outsider by behaving in some way or other like a lunatic is just part of the deal. Right? You have to seem really different from all these suits. That's just absolutely part of the formula. But I think the next generation, I mean, if you look at the, if you look at young Le Pen or at Giorgio Maloney, like the sort of, in Italy, there's a sort of, you know, I think you are seeing in Europe a kinder, gentler, more polished sort of hard.

Right? For sure. And I suspect that's what we'll see here in like a JD Vance. Do you think that JD Vance is going to get tapped for the VP jump? I guess.

I mean, whoever. Then I think the nominee and next time around will feel more conventional in a lot of ways. I mean, that's a very low bar. But do you think that JD Vance will be Trump's pick? Oh, I have no idea.

Michael Moynihan
No idea. Seems plausible. Plausible? I don't know. You're a big mocker in politics.

You know these people. I figured, like, you had the inside scoop. I'll call JD now. Yeah. You know what I think is interesting about the JD pick and why Trump might like him?

Ben Smith
Not only the policies and sort of their agreement on things, but Vance's sort of rejection of the elite plaudits in order to become a Trump acolyte is like, that's gotta scratch the right itch for him, right? Yeah, he has the elite credentials and he kind of renounced them. That's what Trump wants. Yeah. I mean.

Michael Moynihan
I mean, you may. You wrote a book that was a bestseller, that was made into a film by Ron Howard, and you went to Yale. I mean, right? Yeah. Trump loves it.

Yeah. All right, well, let's end it on this, because, you know, it's a very hard conversation to have about a debate in which nothing really happened except for America cringing its way through 90 minutes of the worst television I've seen in a very long time. But, Mary Catherine, where does this go when you see Joy Reid ten minutes after the debate saying the word panic four times in a minute? Where are we going to be with all this panic? Or is it going to subside, as Ben suggested might?

Ben Smith
Gosh, it's so hard to know because the news cycle moves so quickly. But I think it's hard to ignore what happened with Joe Biden on the stage tonight. And it's gonna be hard for even the most dedicated employees of Joe Biden to ignore what happened on the stage now, tonight, I am glad it's not my job to be in the machinations of the democratic party to figure out what comes next, but I don't think it's gonna fade super easily. Joe Biden is gonna be, like, at your 4 July barbecue, like, just trying to prove to you and to every other american that he's just doing fine. Like, that's the only answer for them to shove him out there everywhere.

Mary Kathryn Hamm
Gonna be on, like, charlemagne the God tomorrow. I mean, it's. Oh, my gosh. Breakfast club Biden. Yeah.

Michael Moynihan
Breakfast club Biden. I mean, yeah. I don't think that there's gonna be a lot of pro hamas types calling him genocide Joe. They're like, I don't think he's really paying attention. Ben, any final thoughts on where we go from this, where the democratic party in particular goes from this with Donald Trump?

Mary Kathryn Hamm
Well, I mean, I think one thing. I mean, the main thing, I think, is just, you know, we have a general election, like a national election in November. What's that, three, four months away? And right now, the Democratic Party is just about to spend a month just having a facing inward refighting a fight over who their nominee is gonna be and not really having any spare energy to try to convince anybody who's not already in to vote for the guy, which is not what they need right now. Mary Kathleen, does this move a lot of people?

Michael Moynihan
I mean, you see 90% of people in 2020 who pretty much knew who they were voting for. That number is higher now, closer to 80% who know. So it's a jump ball for a lot of these. Do you think that this is disastrous and that they have to pull back from this because the center can't hold, they cannot win this election? At this point.

Ben Smith
I think that one, a lot of people who are in the middle who might have wanted some issues addressed tonight didn't hear a lot about how that would be addressed other than it's bad while you're on watch. And it was better when I was on watch. That's, you know, Trump's. And it's not a terrible pitch. It's a simple pitch, but they didn't hear a lot about that.

I think a lot of their, a lot of people's opinions of these guys are very baked in for decades. And as far as the panic, I think elites are catching up with voters on this front because the New York Times poll has shown for a while, but particularly this week, 68% of voters already thought that Joe Biden was too old to be an effective president. For the next four years. This is the chattering class realizing what they had already realized. I believe it includes a majority of his own voters from 2020.

Michael Moynihan
Mary Kathryn Hamm, Ben Smith, thank you for joining us. Thanks for having us on.

Thanks for listening. If you liked this episode, even though there is not much to like about this very painful night, please share it with your friends and family and use it to have a conversation of your own and to support honestly. There's just one way to do it. Go to thefp.com and become a subscriber. Today.

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